Spoiler-Free For 30+ Years

I am special. Somehow, at an early age, I had developed an immunity to people "spoiling" a show or movie for me. You can tell me everything that's going to happen and I'll still go see it because the art of storytelling is held by few and many details are left out in the telling of a story. Most people can tell you the "what" of a story but many times they leave out the "how" & the "why" which is what I get to experience for myself.

Case in point: I remember my Dad taking my brother to go see the Clint Eastwood classic  "Firefox", a 1980's Cold War spy thriller where an American Vietnam war pilot is trained to steal an advanced Russian warplane from the heart of the Soviet Union.  I was so envious they had the chance to see it (it was treated "R") that I settled for the next best thing - I had my Dad tell me the entire movie. I sat on the floor of his room for an hour patiently as he explained the intricate plot points, the interactions between the characters, the motivations behind those characters, and the results of decisions made throughout the movie. By the end of the storytelling session, I felt as if I had seen the movie myself.

I eventually rented the movie from the video store and watched it. My Dad's telling of the story was incredibly accurate and have me a deeper understanding of what I was watching. His rendition of events couldn't capture what I thought at the time were some of the best special effects on a movie; I really thought all of the scenes with the plane were so good that I was truly there. I didn't feel that I lost any enjoyment of the source material even though I already knew what was going to happen. I've read Wikipedia summaries of the show "Lost" while watching the episodes during DVD-binging marathons, have had kids tell me the plot points of "Knight Rider" episodes while I was on bio breaks, and have pieced together movies based on parody movies I've seen elsewhere. I never once felt like I missed out on the chance to discover something new for myself.

These days people lose their bloody minds of you "spoil" things for them. To me that level of investment over a movie or TV show is too much. A good story is a good story no matter how is conveyed and can be enjoyed no matter how many times you've heard it before.